Automated Links and the "Dark Side" of the internet...an Issue?

Well, I've made a handful of packets for SICK recently using scrapebox. Including using the blog commenting feature of scrapebox.

The other night, while running my data cleaning scripts (replaces profile.php with register.php etc), I noticed a few questionable sites.

I know these have to be in there from time to time, but my curiosity got the better of me and I started actively looking for them in the packet I'd just made (100 VB forums and 200 SMF).

The good news is, they are pretty rare (only a handful accounting for 2-3% of the packet). The bad news is they can be the worst of the worst. Here are some examples (links not included):

1) Hate sites (Nazi, Skinhead, etc)
2) Child Pornography (yes, there was one of these in the mix)
3) Sites related to Terrorist organizations (Hezbollah/al jazeera etc)
4) Bloody Disgusting (autopsy/RL human gore etc)
5) There are a handful of others that rate much lower on my list such as fetish/porn etc.

While I'm no prude, I was interested in a few things that came to mind when thinking about this. The SEO impact...any? One link here or there can hurt or it'd be pretty easy to harm the competition. How about the legal impact - aka using your own IP address (I don't use proxies in SICK) when signing up to these forums and dropping a link?

I am interested to get others peoples take on "questionable" sites with your backlinks on them...what measures do you go through to avoid this? Is there any real reason (short of some moral obligation) to try and avoid these?

Please mention your backlink volume when pointing out how you approach this issue.

When you process 10k+ backlinks a month, is it really feasible to filter these?

1) Hate sites (Nazi, Skinhead, etc)
2) Child Pornography (yes, there was one of these in the mix)
3) Sites related to Terrorist organizations (Hezbollah/al jazeera etc)
4) Bloody Disgusting (autopsy/RL human gore etc)
5) There are a handful of others that rate much lower on my list such as fetish/porn etc.

I wouldn't be caught dead posting links on a child porn site from my home IP, or any other IP for that matter.

One of my really good friends had the police bust in his house with guns drawn because his brother downloaded something off of limewire. They came in there sticking guns in their face.
Well they kept the computer for like 6+ months and finally gave it back and said it was an "accidental click" and pressed NO charges or continued on with any investigation.

Knowing his brother, I know he was probably just downloading a shit load of porn off limewire.
I guess there was something in one of his downloads, about a minor.

The point is, you can tell it doesnt take much for them to show up at your house one day.

Just a quick correction: Al Jazeera is an international news network, Al Qaeda is a terrorist organization.

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Funny one...Al Jazeera is an international news network. They are also always the first ones to get/broadcast Bin Laden's tapes...makes wonder how well connected they are with terrorists ? Trust me, I know my bad guys...and I mentioned Al Jazeera for a reason. You think it's no issue, go ahead and sign-up there and wait for the FBI watch list

I wouldn't be caught dead posting links on a child porn site from my home IP, or any other IP for that matter.

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I agree with this 100% but the point I'm bringing up is that with automated backlink building (aka scraping your own forums, and using an automatic poster like sick marketing or using Xrummer etc), you aren't reviewing each site that a link hits. More over, if this is being run from a home IP address, there is where the liability lies.

Even with today's proxy accounts, many of them track the IPs that utilized the proxy due to legislation (patriot act etc). The question is, how do you do this in an automated fashioned without running the risk?

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